The Root and Branch Collective

Turning the Agrarian Question inward, upward, and towards the core

In 2014, Julie Guthman published Agrarian Dreams, a work that effectively pumped the breaks on the vision of a food system grounded in localized organic production. Underneath the promising techniques of organic agriculture were deeper exploitative labor relations, treadmills of production, the limitations of certification schemes, and capitalist property regimes. An emancipatory food movement, Guthman argues, must attend to these deeper forces that shape food production with politics, not just horticulture.

Over a decade later, the popular debate about sustainable food has stubbornly refused to advance beyond a reductionist framing of artisanal localism versus techno-utopian productivism. It has varied little from a debate about land use techniques as opposed to the politics of land. Take George Monbiot’s recent essay The Cruel Fantasies of Well Fed People in debate with Chris Smaje’s book Saying No to a Farm-Free Future. In the essay Monbiot sets up a bland binary between a romantic view of inefficient niche production via localism versus the “serious” work of feeding the world with the best possible technologies. As if we have to choose between a world of an anachronistic peasantry scratching away in the dirt and a half-earth utopia where a great share of calories and food products are made in vats powered by cheap green energy.

What’s so strange about this framing is that while yes, there are many who have not taken Guthman’s advice—many have. There is compelling research and political thought about how to reform the food system with a combination of politics, technology, and governance that delivers nourishment without the pitfalls of productivist control or idealization of the bucolic farmer.

There must be a food politics that threads the needle between romanticized agrarian localism and over confident techno-utopianism.

A potential problem with this goal is that the most dominant worked examples of experimental food politics comes from research and experiences in the Global South. Frequently, such models for transformation come from stories of peasant resistance against the ever expanding gears of extraction. The result is an “othering” of the food system reform question to geographies outside the core, where movements like the MST in Brazil and Natural Farming in India reveal that food production can be oriented around a diversity of values instead of purely maximizing yields. But when trying to translate the politics of alternative food movements into models of reform in places where industrialized agriculture is the norm, these examples fail to articulate with the entrenched market, land, and social relations of the Global North. A project of reflexive unwinding of the agrarian politics of the Core is needed. This work of unraveling the cultural, legal, normative layers that shape food systems has potential to break through the pitfalls of both niche production and ecomodernist productivism.

This is why the Root and Branch Collective has been launched, a new framing for food politics in the industrialized world. By turning the question of the future of food inward to the centers of industrial production, we can better understand the conditions that shape the agrarian sector and build a politics of transformation that evades simple binaries.

To understand why this approach needed and what it is different from, we have developed a set of commitments open for engagement and reflection.

Our Commitments

We are a group of scholars, based in Europe, whose work coalesces around an interest in the revolutionary potential of the agrarian question of geographies broadly understood as the ‘Global North’, with a particular focus on Europe. These are places where the agrarian land regime is considered settled, ‘mature’ or ‘complete’: our work seeks to problematise these narratives and to suggest the need for a critical reconsideration of the significance of the agrarian question in these societies, particularly in light of ongoing and escalating political turmoil within and about rural landscapes.

Theoretically, we draw on concepts, tools and ideas from the fields of critical agrarian studies, legal geography, anti-colonial Marxism, postcolonial studies and world systems theory among other theoretical traditions. While we are diverse in terms of our disciplinary backgrounds, areas of study, and precise theoretical groundings, we nonetheless share a core set of principles or commitments that are central to the work we do as a collective.

These are as follows:

• A commitment to the fundamental requirement of radical land reforms as the basis for socio-ecological transformation.

• At a time of converging catastrophic crisis, we take seriously the role of theory and ideological struggle, but believe that theory cannot be for the sake of mere debate, the academy or point-scoring. Theory must be informed by praxis and ultimately serve more effective forms of praxis.

• We situate agrarian struggles over land in global geographies and genealogies of colonialism, racial capitalism and imperialism, and processes of extraction, enclosure, exploitation and expropriation. We conceive of food sovereignty and agroecology as key parts of a broader project of dismantling racial capitalism and its colonial food system. In practice, this means a belief in the need for material solidarity with anti-colonial movements. We celebrate the agrarian and the rural as a diverse site of political possibility, conviviality and knowledge. At the same time, we highlight the danger of romanticising any idealised rural experience or virtue, preferring instead to centre the emancipatory potential of life in rural places which are entangled with sites, peoples and struggles both in other rural and in urban places.

• We recognise the existence of biophysical limits and thresholds in terms of agricultural possibility, whilst rejecting any form of Malthusianism, populationism or engineered asceticism.

• We consider the transformation of the way we feed and otherwise provision ourselves from the land towards abundance, justice and liberation to be possible. Yet we emphasise that this change cannot come through changing practices alone. Instead, we centre the need for political economic transformation, institution building, and struggle over state power, that goes beyond reformism in order to cultivate new subjectivities and capacities regarding how we relate to our food, our agriculture, our non-human companion species and each other. This goes hand-in-hand with a commitment to abolishing the systems of violence and oppression that constrain our abilities to build a world in common that is not classed, raced, gendered or otherwise structured by oppression.

• To inspire and inform the aforementioned transformations, we are committed to unearthing land-based revolutionary histories, traditions and epistemologies within the Global North that have been expropriated, disciplined and buried under narratives of civilisational progress and industrialisation. In particular, we reject an ecomodernist vision of the rural that either sees no place for farming, or which seeks to further intensify and modernise agriculture in order to ‘spare’ land ‘for nature’.

• We hold a critical but iterative relationship with existing agricultural technologies which recognises the social relations that have produced them and that they co-produce, and which asserts the need to embed these within democratic institutions.

• We acknowledge the incipient possibility of fascism associated with both techno-optimistic, eco-modernist and regressive, neo-Chayanovian visions of rural life, and argues for an agrarian politics that is in solidarity with urgent ongoing liberation struggles associated with the persistence of intersectional oppressions faced by racialized, gendered, queer and neurodivergent people.

• Building on the work of both existing and historic scholars and organisers, and in the face of ongoing uneven ecological exchange and deeply problematic and violent neo-colonial logics of agricultural development, knowledge dissemination and cultural fetishism, our work recognises the need to take responsibility for our own agrarian questions in the Global North. By taking up this position in institutions and contexts in the imperial core and their settler colonies, we look to hone our approach to these questions in the context of our own polities and landscapes in a way that is both cognizant and celebratory of the realities of agricultural lifeways of producers across the Global South and amongst Indigenous peoples and peasant communities everywhere.